The long journey, started in 1997 has now come to an end for Winamp. Yes, My favorite media player is shutting down on December 20, 2013.

Winamp was initially developed by two students from University of Utah (Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev). They integrated their Windows user interface with the Advanced Multimedia Products "AMP" MP3 file playback engine. The name Winamp (originally spelled WinAMP) was a portmanteau of "Windows" and "AMP".

Within 3 years of its starting, the player had over 25 million registered users and it continued. But soon after it was acquired by AOL, it started loosing its charm. Though later on, its Linux, MAC and Android version was released, it doesn't worked too much.

"Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years."

The latest stable release of the software is version 5.666.3512 (released on November 26, 2013). You can grab it from here. There is also a preview release available for version 5.7.3444 (released on August 22, 2013), which can be downloaded from forum site.